Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars [Hardcover]

Bernard F. Dick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2004

" Hal Wallis might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced -- Casablanca, Jezebel, Now Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies) -- have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America's film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked and no full-length study has yet assessed his incredible career. A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the business of film as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater in 1922. He attracted the notice of the Warner brothers, who hired him as a publicity assistant. Within three months he was director of the department, and appointments to studio manager and production executive quickly followed. Wallis went on to oversee dozens of productions and formed his own production company in 1944. Bernard F. Dick draws on numerous sources such as Wallis's personal production files and exclusive interviews with many of his contemporaries to finally tell the full story of his illustrious career. Dick combines his knowledge of behind-the-scenes Hollywood with fascinating anecdotes to create a portrait of one of Hollywood's early power players.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This readable and well-documented book is enhanced by interviews with Wallis's widow and with numerous individuals who worked with Wallis in Hollywood.... Recommended" -- Choice

"Includes enough good gossip to keep movie addicts reading." -- Hollywood Reporter

"Heston remarked, 'Hal was very good. Surely one of the two or three best of them all.' Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars offers plenty of reasons to take that assessment seriously, and it gives a great filmmaker his due." -- Hollywood Reporter

"For someone whose name appears in the credits of hundreds of movies, Hal Wallis doesn't get a lot of credit. Bernard F. Dick has tried to rectify that with the first biography of the great Hollywood producer." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"A masterful job of charting Wallis's career and examining his roles as production executive and independent producer. This is an engaging and illuminating narrative." -- Film Quarterly

"It is one thing to understand the complex operation of the film industry, particularly in the wake of the studios having been absorbed into conglomerates. It is quite another to tell the story of the producers involved in this industry with insight and wit, in a way that appeals to the general reader as well as to film scholars. Bernard Dick has accomplished this feat once again in his book on Hal Wallis." -- Gene Phillips, Loyola University

About the Author

Bernard F. Dick, professor of communications and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, is the author of numerous books on film history, including Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky (May 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813123178
• ISBN-13: 978-0813123172
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #939,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Golden Age, November 6, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars (Hardcover)

Contrary to the other reviewers, HAL WALLIS is indeed a worthy book on its subject, the gutsy, somewhat nutty Hollywood production head whose career took a tragic turn when he got too uppity for Jack Warner's taste in 1943, and pretty soon Warner made the studio too uncomfortable a place to work in, and Wallis was forced to leave. He then wound up at Paramount, where his pictures, while individually interesting, lacked the stature of the Warners' studio masterpieces.

What went wrong? As Bernard Dick relates, the Warner Brothers needed Wallis to come up with films that would ape the sheen of high-class MGM, its great rival. Wallis indeed wound up producing dozens of imitation MGM films, everything from WHITE BANNERS to ROBIN HOOD to FOUR DAUGHTERS to JEZEBEL--these four all made within a single year, 1938. Wallis' films stood out from the typical run of Warners productions, which often emphasized a proletarian, socially conscious "street smart" attitude, often featuring Bogart, Robinson, Blondell, etc, stars with whom the underclasses could identify with. Not so Wallis.

At Paramount Wallis decided to become a "starmaker" (the title of his autobiography) with mixed results. He had a taste for strong, supermasculine men, and promoted Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas to superstardom (and ten years later, Elvis Presley, who sort of fits in that mold); but sometimes his predilection for the strong and the silent went haywire and he spent picture after picture trying to make a star from the charisma-free Wendell Corey, whom Dick claims was anti-Semitic to boot.

As for Wallis' female stars, he showed a decided taste for the freakish. Who else but Hal Wallis would have signed up Shirley Booth and Anna Magnani? In an industry dominated by beauty and the hyperfeminine, Booth and Magnani were dark stars indeed. And there was something freakish also about the andrgogynous appeal of Lizabeth Scott and Shirley MacLaine as well. Dick discusses all of these actors at great length, and yes, he seems to slight the Warners movies at the expense of the Paramount and Universal films, but it's plain that he sees the later, independent productions as more revealing of the kind of man Hal Wallis was. And he had the good taste to interview quite a number of Wallis' lesser known stars, including Douglas Dick (no relation I assume to Bernard Dick), the lovely Kristine Miller, and Dolores Hart, now a nun.

He reveals that Martha Hyer began her romance with Wallis (she eventually became his second wife) many years before she had previously admitted, in her memoir, to having dated him. Reading Wallis and Hyer's memoirs you would think that they began seeing each other only after the death of Wallis' first wife, the madcap comedy star Louise Fazenda. But actually that was a white lie and they met when poor Louise was very much alive. Dick does an artful job of deconstructing the Wallis and Hyer memoirs to find out how, when truth is fudged, it invariably finds a way to speak itself through the broken texts of STARMAKER and FINDING MY WAY.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A choppy book, June 30, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars (Hardcover)

Hal Wallis is a worthy subject for a big biography, but this book doesn't get the job done. It is simply not thorough enough.

A warning: If you're interested in Wallis' fantastic years at Warner Bros. - the era of Bogart, Cagney, Raft, Flynn, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan - this book isn't for you. The author spends much more time dealing with Wallis' independent productions, particularly his big budget productions in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hal Wallis, a superb movie producer, certainly deserves a book that is more focused and complete.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wallis deserved better, May 8, 2004

By 

John (Culver City, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars (Hardcover)

How Bernard Dick managed to write about the life and films of Hal Wallis in such an uninteresting way is certainly an accomplishment. Wallis was in charge of production at Warner Brothers for most of the 30's and into the 40's, but Dick chooses to ignore that period. This was the period when Wallis gave the studio its look and style.

A movie like "Kings Row" gets no mention at all, but Dick plods on for a dozen pages about movies in which Wallis "could have" cast Lizabeth Scott, and plays he "should have" bought and brought to the screen. It's almost like the author doesn't care for his subject or the movies he made. He'd rather that Wallis made some other movies he could write about.

The book does delve a little more deeply into the personal life, more than Wallis chose to in his autobiography. But what is clearly lacking is why we should be interested in this man who was behind so many beloved films - "Now, Voyager", "Dark Victory", "Confessions of a Nazi Spy", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "The Rose Tattoo", "Beckett", "Gunfight at the OK Corral", "The Maltese Falcon", and of course "Casablanca". Wallis was a producer who had a hand in every creative decision on his movies (just read "Round Up the Usual Suspects" and see how he shaped "Casablanca"). If you are looking to learn what Wallis did to make his films special, it's not in this book. (...)